Look 'Ma, No Hands: Part-Task Training of Perceptual-Cognitive Skills to Accelerate Psychomotor Expertise

Emerging sports science research reveals that expert performance in rapid and reactive skills such as baseball batting, return-of-serve in tennis, and goalie play in hockey and soccer is based on superior perceptual-cognitive skills that allow a competitor to perceive predictive cues in an opponent's actions. Situational decision-making, such as the pass/dribble/shoot decision of soccer or basketball players and the run/pass recognition of football linebackers, also relies on perceptual-cognitive skills. Sports science researchers have developed video-occlusion as a method for isolating and measuring perceptual-cognitive skills separate from psychomotor execution of the skills. Using an expert-novice research paradigm, athletes of varying skill levels are shown point-of-view video clips of an opponent executing an action. Clips are occluded, or masked, to reveal expert advantage in identifying and predicting the actions of the video opponent. In spatial occlusion portions of the video display are masked to study where experts look to pick up predictive information. In temporal occlusion the video display is cut off at various points during playback to study when experts pick up predictive information. Some researchers, including the author, have repurposed the video-occlusion method in order to systematically train sport-specific perceptualcognitive skills. Training-based studies show that perceptual-cognitive skills can be improved through video-occlusion training and, further, that performance of the full sport skill can be improved. The implication for training of complex psychomotor skills in military contexts (e.g., vehicle operation, use-offorce, emergency response) is that perceptual-cognitive component skills associated with expert performance can be identified, isolated, and trained using video-occlusion methods that are less expensive and more portable than high-fidelity simulator-based training.